by Hrag Vartanian
When Dareh Gregorian arrived in New York ten years ago it was in many ways a homecoming. He was born in Texas and has lived elsewhere but he spent his teenage years in New York when his father Vartan Gregorian was President of New York's Public Library. It was a transition he best describes as a "culture shock" compared to the sleepy suburbs he knew.
As a New York Post court reporter, Dareh is in tune with what makes the city tick. In a city flooded by media of every kind, the New York Post stands out as the loudest in the crowd. A tabloid that New Yorkers love to hate, Dareh understands that nonetheless the paper's words and images resonate in the subways, offices, homes and streets, "It's the most controversial and the most talked about newspaper in the city. It's got a lot of critics, but the people talking about it are reading it all the time." That may just be an understatement.
Known for its aggressively explicative headlines, when the American reprisals on Afghanistan began, the paper screamed "TALI-BAM" in its typical in-your-face editorial style.
Dareh knows there's a purpose to the Post's moxie, "The editorial slant of it is conservative which is a necessity for the city because it is the only one of its kind. It's a fun newspaper that's been good to me."
Covering New York demands a sense of humor Dareh insists, "I enjoy bizarre stories and New York is the place for them. A couple of months ago, I wrote about a guy who was suing for visitation rights to his million-dollar wine collection that his ex-wife held on to. The most ridiculous are the most enjoyable to write."
Dareh has a hectic schedule with no lack of stories, "The challenge is keeping your hand in different areas at the same time. There are days where I do six stories, get out of the office at 9 p.m. and I'm ready to collapse."
Covering everything from rap star P.Diddy's divorce to the city-wide coalition of parents suing New York State's discriminatory education system, Dareh also has an intimate knowledge of Mayor Giuliani after covering his soap-opera divorce from day one.
So what does Dareh think about the Mayor? "An interesting guy," he says after a pause and a smile, "He was in one of the most bizarre stories I've done. He came down to serve as a juror in a civil case and it happened to be a guy suing the city for having his privates scalded in the shower when the water temperature changed inexplicably. So the sight of having the Mayor of New York City sitting in the jury box while someone is passing around a picture of his privates was a very New York moment."
His more recent stories have not been as enjoyable. Faster than a New York minute, September 11th disposed of the rehashed stories of socialite scandals and celebrity adventures that became the tedium of paper headlines.
Post-9/11, he is writing about rescue efforts at the World Trade Center site and helped with a highly controversial article on the new "Police State" that some law enforcement officials and citizens have been describing as the reality of post-9/11 New York. "Supreme Court coverage doesn't seem a priority right now," Dareh says about the new focus that has led him to zoom in on the aftershocks of a scarred city.
Mara Der Hovanesian knows the feeling, she doesn't need reminding about an event that changed the rules of reporting. As a reporter for Business Week magazine and a Financial District resident, she senses the shift in people's mindset.
"A friend of mine once told me, 'No matter where you live, it becomes a city within a city,' she was right. Now, after the attack it is even more so. I found myself hugging the guy who fixes my shoes because I was so happy to see him," Der Hovanesian says about her experience living four blocks from the World Trade Center.
"First of all, I can't sleep. Your perspective changes and you think about what is important. Sometimes I wish I were flipping burgers or some mechanical thing. I feel challenged to do things that are more important. At first, people were walking around like zombies. I was displaced for a week, which I find a minor miracle, and I went to live with a friend. I used to see the towers from the deck I share with my neighbors but now I see a big hole. They represented infinity—the infinite ingenuity and creativity as well as spirit because they were so singular and sleek. But I wonder if I'm saying that as an afterthought because I didn't appreciate them enough when they were there."
Living in the Financial District and writing about business from Midtown gives Der Hovanesian insight into the various perspectives regarding the attack, "Business reporters all of a sudden became war correspondents. It was no longer writing about market value alone, every time you made a phone call to a Wall Street friend, you asked is everyone OK? Did you have any damage or did anyone lose a loved one? That's not what I initially bargained for."
Originally from Massachusetts, she attended college and worked in the Bay Area with an idea that she wanted to write about business. At the time, it seemed like a quirky thing to do, "I thought it was an easy and exacting way to explain the world, not like politics which is very murky and gray, and not like feature writing which is touchy-feely. It seemed like there was something you can use to have a definite framework like numbers, profits, sales or target markets."
Business Weekis an internationally distributed magazine with two million subscriptions. That credibility is impressive but also forces Mara to communicate to a wide and highly diverse business audience, "It's like being a translator. Often they have to simplify it for me in order that I can take what sometimes sounds like a foreign language and convey it into something people can understand and use."
"As a writer you don't have a sense of the audience, I often wonder if they even read my stuff. It's surprising when you get feedback. Sometimes it feels like you're sending things out into a vacuum. I want it to be interesting, helpful and help them understand the world and markets around them."
What Mara and Dareh do with words, Harry Koundakjian does with pictures. A photographer for over four decades, his own September 11th memories are stark. "I saw the plane coming in the city from my house on the Upper West Side. The plane was shaky, the noise seemed very peculiar and it was flying very close to the city. I took a cab to work and when I heard of the crash I had a journalist's instinct that it was the plane I had seen," Koundakjian says about an event he can only describe as unbearable.
Singular in its impact, the attack evoked frightening memories from a past filled with disaster coverage, "It reminded me of the period of my life in Beirut when I was traveling between East and West Beirut. There were snipers everywhere and that experience came back to me. I refused to go to Ground Zero, knowing I had seen enough catastrophes in my life. I don't think I would've been able to do a proper job."
A veteran photojournalist, Koundakjian lived through years of fighting and the Israeli invasion in 1982. During the invasion, he encountered Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, at that time General of the Israeli forces, and asked him why he bombed the area around his home in today's West Beirut populated by a diverse mix of peoples. "Why do you live in West Beirut?" Sharon asked Koundakjian, to which the photojournalist replied, "Before you came there was no West Beirut."
After covering the major earthquake in northeastern Iran in 1978, which Paris Match published over a multi-page spread, the 1972 Munich Olympic assassinations of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists, and the 1999 earthquake in northwest Turkey, Koundakjian knows he's seen enough.
"Some of the photographers here in New York stupidly risked their lives out of a sense of duty that they needed to show the world what had happened. A few photographers were injured because of their insane proximity to the buildings but thankfully none I know of were killed. I think my colleagues would agree that in the future they will have to be more cautious in the limits they are willing to take," Koundakjian remarks.
As International Photo-Editor at Associated Press since his arrival in New York in 1979, he's been active in ensuring that international publications receive the highest quality images in a world increasingly obsessed with the universality of images rather than the written word.
From the time of the attack until the middle of October, Koundakjian's workday was ballooned from his usually eight-hour five-day routine to a seven-day workweek that lasted 12 to 14 hours, "The tension has grown and it is evident. The mood in the city changed drastically. People weren't smiling, and they hated something they didn't understand and that frustrated many. If you mathematically calculate the number of deaths and the time it took, it was one of the worst disasters in world history. The city is definitely not back to normal."
"I have not gone downtown. I can't imagine going to enjoy the sights, which I hear many people are doing. There is a sense of very negative nostalgia for me and I haven't been able to find the courage or heart to shoot pictures at Ground Zero. It is certainly the biggest thing I've ever experienced," Koundakjian asserts.
As the smoke settles, New York's media has realized that it is not immune to the effects of war. The war, which is how the fall-out of September 11th is now being described, has taken on new and unfamiliar fronts that war before this century never knew. Anthrax, biological and chemical weapons have entered the consciousness of most New Yorkers like never before. The media itself is a target and New York's reporters and photographers are realizing that they are on the frontlines.
